In the latest episode of the podcast “Grounded,” bassist Jeff Ament revealed that he got a visit from the Secret Service because of a controversial poster he designed for Pearl Jam’s 2018 show in Missoula, Montana.
As Ament (a Montana state native) explains, the poster in question – which contained an image of the White House burning, a cracked Washington Monument, and former Montana Senator Jon Tester flying about all of the destruction on a tractor – was inspired by satirical political cartoons.
“I worked on this poster with a guy who’s kind of a cartoonist, this guy Bobby Brown. And I used him, because his stuff is very obviously cartoony… But it was all real stuff. It was things that were going on… It’s the way political cartoons should be. Like a comedian, you should be able to say anything, because it’s a cartoon, it’s comedy. So, I didn’t think the Secret Service was gonna show up [laughs].”
When asked by hosts Maritsa Georgiou and Jon Tester if he was really investigated by the Secret Service, Ament replied:
“Yeah, for sure. I got interviewed. Because it was a ‘threat,’ you know? There was a comment on the back of the poster that I made about, like ‘It’s time for action.’ And then I went on to talk about how important it is to vote, and whatever. And they took ‘time for action’ as, like, some kind of a threat, I guess. You know, they’re threatened by people voting.”
He continued, explaining the meaning behind the poster:
“It was a metaphor. It was everything that was going on in D.C. at that time. It was like, ‘The house was on fire,’ was the metaphor. And so the White House is on fire, and then you see lots of little elements of things that were going on, you know. There’s a picture of a President with a briefcase full of money, with a sickle and hammer on it. So there’s, like, the Russia stuff.
“And then it has a picture of Jon [Tester] over the top of it in a tractor. And it was me saying that: here we have a guy in our state that is above all that nonsense, all that chaos that’s going on in the White House. We have a guy in our state that is as real as they come, and is sort of operating outside of what was to become the oligarchy…
“Yeah the poster was a cartoon, just mostly supporting Jon, and just saying, like, how Jon exists outside of D.C.”
(Transcribed by Alternative Nation)
